Toshiko Horiuchi Macadam's Public Art

Hakone Open Air Park

I don't often crochet afghans even though I love planning them and love the way they look.  It's just that they're so darned BIG!  Often I end up tired of working on the same project and put it aside for awhile - when you repeat this several times, it takes years to finish.  So when I first saw photographs of Toshiko Horiuchi Mcadam's giant crochet/knitted fiber art playgrounds I was stunned.  They're gorgeous and look like they'd be amazingly fun to play on, but oh my gosh .... they'd take me decades to get finished!

Fibre Columns/Romanesque Church, knitted nylon.

Toshiko started out her artistic career crocheting/knitting large sculptural pieces from different monochromatic neutral colors of different fibers.  You can tell that she's long been influenced by architecture from one of these pieces, Fibre Columns/Romanesque Church.  The story goes that she was exhibiting a piece titled Multiple Hammock No. 1 in a gallery when two children asked if they could sit in it.  She told them they could and had one of those art changing revelations when she saw the static sculpture come to life as they climbed over and swung on it.  At that point she switched to creating the brightly colored, public art for children she's become famous for.

Arch Daily, an architectural publication, has a great interview with her in which she talks about some of the nitty, gritty of how she creates her pieces - mainly long, long hours with some help from her husband and an assistant.

And her website has beautiful pictures of the projects she's worked on like these from the Hakone Open Air Museum in Japan and ...

the JangHeung Art Park in South Korea.

Very inspiring!!

Happy Creating!  Deborah